Inventing Mastery: Patriarchal Precedents and the Legal Status of Indigenous People in Australia

The paper discusses some aspects of Aboriginal legal status in Australia from the perspective of survival, transformation and reinvention of early modern legal codifications of household mastery. Traces of masters' and husbands' entitlement to the labour of servants, children and wives, as well as their magistracy over household dependents, not only survive in today's laws and social relations; at times, they have been reinvented in a process which reversed the presumed movement from contract to status. The original dispossession of Australia's Indigenous peoples by British settlers set the stage for a particularly destructive instance of such process. Its legacy continues to shape contemporary struggles for Aboriginal rights.